Dark Passages 2: Pilar & Elias

by Reinke, Sara

  “Here,” she said, and because he wouldn’t open his eyes, wouldn’t respond to her voice, she said it in his mind too, probing deeply, stirring him abruptly back to consciousness. Elías, wake up. Take these.

  He groaned in protest as she tried to ease one of the pills into his mouth. She got it past his lips, but he turned his head, spitting it out. Pilar pushed it back, then the others besides—five in all—and clamped her hand over his mouth to force him to hold them in. He shook his head, mewling against her hand, his eyes wide and frightened.

  “It’s all right,” Pilar whispered. Something wet spattered down against his skin—tears—and she realized she was weeping. “It’s all right, Elías. Oh, God, it’s okay now…” In a tear-choked hush, she sang her father’s lullaby to him:

  “El coquí, el coquí siempre canta

  es muy lindo el cantar del coquí

  por las noches a veces me duermo

  con el dulce cantar del coquí

  coquí, coquí, coquí, qui, qui, qui.”

  At her soft voice, the gentle song, Elías’s frantic struggles waned. He relaxed beneath her, his eyelids drooping shut again. By the time she finished, the tremors that had stricken him had fully subsided.

  Oh, God, Elías, I’m so sorry, she thought, drawing her hand away from his mouth. His brows lifted and he murmured, distressed, but when she touched his face again, stroking his hair, he quieted. I didn’t know. I never would have done this…never would have left you here if I’d known.

  She curled onto her side next to him, tucking her cheek against his shoulder. I’m sorry, she thought, stricken, closing her eyes as more tears spilled. He would have realized what was happening when he’d felt the first symptoms coming on, but because of the handcuffs, had been unable to get to the pills himself and had, in essence, been trapped on the bed.

  “I’m so sorry,” she whispered, trembling against him. I didn’t mean to… I didn’t know. I’d die if anything happened to you…if I hurt you somehow.

  Please forgive me, Elías. Please.

  ****

  It was still dark outside when Elías came to. His eyelids peeled back and he blinked, bewildered and groggy, up at the ceiling of his bedroom. Pilar slept beside him, her body tucked against his own. He glanced down, found the crown of her head nestled into his shoulder, her hand draped lightly against his stomach.

  What…happened? he thought, because he’d dreamed that she left; she’d handcuffed him to the bed frame, taken his car and then…

  And then everything seemed murky to him. One moment she had left him, and in the next, she was back. Only her face had been different, terrifying to him.

  Her eyes had gone black, he thought dimly. And her teeth…!

  With a soft groan, he sat up, slipping his arm from beneath Pilar and settling her gently against the mattress without rousing her. Although he remained naked, she had dressed again at some point, her white dress tangled around her thighs as she slept. As he stood, his head swam, and he stumbled dizzily into the wall. Groaning again, he brought the heel of his hand up to his brow, then blinked in surprise to find half a set of handcuffs affixed around his wrist. He’d pulled at it hard enough at some point to lay open the skin of his arm; blood had crusted in a thin smear from the delta of his thumb down to the crook of his elbow. The cuff was locked, but the chain had been broken, the stout metal link pried violently in half.

  What the hell…? Stupidly, he looked at the bed again and saw the other half of the restraints still attached to the headboard. It wasn’t a dream, then. She cuffed me to the bed.

  Limping from the bedside, he made his way down the corridor toward the kitchen, leaning heavily against the wall. His entire body felt leaden, his feet impossibly heavy, his knees uncertain and weak.

  I need to eat. In the kitchen, he stumbled past the overturned mixing bowl they’d knocked on the floor earlier, shuffling through spilled flour, the dough that had now caked and dried there. He opened the refrigerator, pulled out a loaf of bread, then collapsed to the floor, cradling it in his lap. He all but shoved a slice into his mouth, then leaned his head back against the cabinet door behind him, eyes closed as he chewed.

  What happened to me? he thought again. Because if Pilar had really handcuffed him to the bed, then maybe other things he’d at first thought only dreams had been real too. I couldn’t reach my glucose pills. I felt my blood sugar bottoming out.

  At some point, the hypoglycemia had reached a critical enough point to make him delirious. He’d been hallucinating; that had to explain why he thought Pilar had sprouted fangs upon her return, that her eyes had gone black, like a doll’s eyes or a shark’s.

  By all rights, if his blood sugar had been that low, severe neurological damage couldn’t have been far behind. The only explanation for him being awake now, walking, talking, eating, thinking—hell, the only explanation for him being alive was that Pilar had saved him.

  But how? I never told her about the pills, never really talked to her about my diabetes. How did she know what to do?

  With a glance again at the broken handcuff still dangling from his wrist, he wondered, And since I know I’m not strong enough to bust through solid steel, how in the hell did that happen?

  He heard a funny little beeping sound from nearby and frowned. What the…? he wondered, then realized—he’d kicked off his pants in the kitchen, and they lay in a discarded heap by the dishwasher. His cell phone had been in his pocket.

  “Mierda,” he muttered, wincing as he crawled to his knees, then groped for the pants. He fished his phone out and realized that Mueller had tried to call him several times; the beeping sound was to notify him that he had missed calls.

  “Mierda,” Elías said again, drawing the phone to his ear, thumbing the speed dial button for Mueller’s line.

  “Must be nice,” Mueller said by way of greeting, picking up midway through the first ring, as if he’d been holding the phone in his hand, waiting on Elías to call him back. “Keeping banker’s hours, I mean.”

  “I’m sorry,” Elías said. “I was sleeping. My phone was in the other room.”

  “You okay? You don’t sound too hot.”

  “I’m fine.” Elías pushed his hair back from his face. “What’s up?”

  “I’ve got a friend of yours lying in the men’s room at Boone’s Tavern,” Mueller said. “Ever hear of the place?”

  “No,” Elías said. “What makes you think he’s one of mine?”

  “He’s got one of those Jesus tattoos on his chest. Bartender said his name’s Tomás Lovato. Comes in quite a bit. Drives a blue motorcycle I’ve got parked outside.”

  Elías’s eyes flew wide at the name Tomás Lovato. Biting back a groan, he stumbled to his feet. “Give me ten minutes,” he told Mueller over the phone. “I’m on my way.”

  ****

  Before leaving, he leaned over the bed, stroking his hand lightly against Pilar’s head. Her hair felt slightly damp to him, which struck him as odd.

  Please tell me you didn’t have anything to do this, he thought—not for the first time since getting off the phone with Mueller. He knelt beside the bed, torn between wanting to wake her up and make love to her again, or shake her until her teeth rattled and demand she tell him what the fuck was going on. Madre de Dios, Pilar, please tell me you didn’t help Valien murder Tomás Lovato. Because if you did…ay, woman, I can’t protect you. God help me, I can’t.

  He’d written her a note, adding in block letters at the bottom of the pages: DON’T LEAVE. He left it at the bedside, propped against the alarm clock so that she wouldn’t miss it if she woke while he was gone.

  When he opened the driver’s side door to the Charger, he noticed the suit blazer she’d taken from his closet lying rumpled in the seat. He picked it up, his curious frown deepening. Why is it all wet? he wondered. The seat beneath remained relatively dry, and he tossed the jacket in the back as he settled himself behind the wheel.

  Mueller had given him directions to
the crime scene, and it hadn’t escaped Elías’s notice that the bar, Boone’s Tavern, was located along the very same route he’d driven earlier that evening, when he’d brought Pilar from her house to his own. He was familiar enough with Tomás Lovato to know that he had a distinctive motorcycle—not just a blue body, as Mueller had reported, but with wheel rims painted to match. Elías hadn’t noticed a bike like that on the drive, but he’d had his eyes on the road…or on Pilar.

  But if she saw it, he thought. I’m willing to bet she’d have recognized it too.

  He’d fallen asleep after they’d made love, though for how long until he’d woken up to find himself cuffed to the bed, he didn’t know. Long enough at any rate for her to call Valien, let him know where Lovato was hanging out.

  Upon arriving at the bar, he found four squad cars parked in a loose perimeter around the building, lights flashing, a flapping line of crime scene tape suspended just inside of them. A crime scene van had also been pulled up close to the building. Curiously, so had a city utility truck. Elías could see uniformed officers walking in and out of the building, scoping out the grounds, carrying paper grocery bags of evidence out of the tavern. Flashing his badge as he stepped out of the Charger, he ducked around the police tape and went inside.

  The first thing that struck him was that the bar had flooded. There was at least a half-inch of standing water on the floor. “What the fuck?” he murmured in surprise, dancing back as he sloshed across the threshold.

  “Hope you’ve got galoshes in your trunk,” Mueller called from across the room. He stood near an opened doorway to what was presumably the bathroom, while a pair of crime scene technicians took digital images of something just inside the doorway.

  “You might have told me that before I left the house,” Elías growled with a frown, the cuffs of his pants now soaked. “What happened? Toilet back up?”

  Mueller shook his head. “Sink taps broke clean out of the wall. We’re talking high-pressure geyser. We had to have the water shut off at the street main.”

  That explains the utility truck, then, Elías thought. “What broke it?” he asked.

  “Offhand, I’d say Tomás Lovato’s ass,” Mueller remarked. “Or maybe his head. Whichever part of him hit the sink first.”

  “You sure it’s him?”

  “Oh yeah.” Mueller hooked his thumb toward the bar, where another officer was collecting a statement from a man who sat shell-shocked and shivering on a stool. “The bartender says he comes in once, maybe twice a week. Often enough for him to know him on sight.”

  Elías went to stand beside the older officer and froze, eyes wide. Just beyond the threshold, he could see a large man lying prone on the ground. The water had apparently been the deepest in the bathroom, and a small electric pump was busily at work flushing water out into the main bar area. Broken pieces of a toilet bowl tank lid lay scattered on the floor. Judging by the fact that the guy looked like ground round from the neck up, it was logical to assume said lid had been used to bash his skull in. Another shard protruded messily from the man’s torso.

  “What a mess,” Mueller said, his standard response to just about any crime scene.

  “He get a look at the guy who jumped Lovato in here?” Elías asked.

  “Oh, sure.” Mueller nodded, sounding oddly cheerful. “Only he said it wasn’t a guy. It was a woman.”

  Elías blinked at him, feeling for all the world like he’d just been dropkicked in the balls. “What?”

  “A woman,” Mueller repeated. “Said she came in about ten minutes before this can of hell broke loose.” This time he nodded toward the bathroom. “Said she was early to mid-twenties, about five-six, maybe a hundred and ten pounds. Latina, long brown hair. Said she was wearing a white dress.”

  Jesus, Elías thought, stunned, because based on Mueller’s description alone, Pilar had just gone from accomplice who had pointed her brother in the general direction of his next vendetta victim to full-fledged accessory to the murder itself.

  “Oh, and sandals. Spike-heeled sandals,” Mueller continued. “We found them in the bathroom.” He motioned toward one of the crime techs, who handed him a paper sack. Mueller then shoved it into Elías’s hands. He hadn’t paid much attention to Pilar’s shoes earlier in the evening, but when he looked inside, the sandals were familiar enough to leave him stifling an unhappy groan.

  “Very Cinderella-esque,” Mueller told him. “Only these glass slippers had blood all over the heels, like she did a little ass-kicking instead of dancing in them.”

  “A woman couldn’t have done this.” Elías spoke as much to himself as the other detective. “There’s no way she could have physically overpowered a guy Lovato’s size. Hell, I don’t think even I could’ve taken him out.” And I’ve got at least three inches and thirty pounds on Pilar, he added in his mind.

  Mueller shrugged, unbothered. “There’s a security camera above the bar.” He turned and pointed. “Go see for yourself. I’ve got the tape cued up in the office behind the bar. We’ve got a few shots of the girl coming in, talking it up with Lovato before they both head for the can.”

  Elías didn’t want to watch. A knot twisted in his gut. He had a sinking feeling of what he’d see on that tape. “Sure,” he said, forcing himself to sound nonchalant, as if it was no big deal, as if the woman he’d just spent the better part of his evening making love to wouldn’t be on that tape in grainy black-and-white glory, leading a man to his untimely death.

  ****

  It can’t be Pilar. It just can’t.

  As he sat down in the vinyl chair in the tavern office, Elías thought this, over and over, his eyes round and stricken. He’d closed the door behind him and sat at the cluttered desk, staring at the small TV screen in front of him. After a moment in which static jumped and bounced on screen, an image came into view, ghostlike. From a bird’s-eye vantage, he could see the interior of the bar outside the office.

  It had apparently been a slow night, and the picking of patrons had been slim. In the far side of the frame, Elías saw at least three people moving back and forth around a pool table. He also spied Tomás Lovato sitting at the end of the bar, facing the general direction of the camera. Several empty shot glasses lined the counter in front of him, while he cradled one in his hand, tossing it back in a single gulp. An overflowing ashtray rested near his right hand, and he’d draw a smoldering cigarette to his mouth, the air around his head hazy with smoke. His gaze was distant, downcast and distracted, but all at once, his head shot up. Before she even walked into view, Elías knew what—or more specifically who—had captured Lovato’s attention.

  Pilar, he thought, pained. The picture quality was for shit, but for him, there was no mistaking her, even from behind, even though she’d pulled her hair up and off her shoulders. She strolled catlike, languid and unafraid across the bar, approaching one of the men who Elías suspected had raped her, then murdered her father, as if she had every right and reason in the world to be there.

  The knot in his stomach tightened all the more as he watched her sit down beside him. Lovato caught her by the arm, but still, she only smiled, leaning toward him to speak. There was no sound; Elías could only imagine what exchange might have taken place between them, and the more he imagined, the harder it became for him to breathe. When Lovato rose to his feet, jerking Pilar against him in an abrupt, angry gesture, Elías hooked his fingers into the brittle vinyl of the chair arms, his brows furrowing. That son of a bitch, he thought. Had he recognized her? Tried to hurt her, attack her in the bar?

  But then she wriggled against him, unmistakably provocative, and when he saw her reach between Lovato’s legs, rubbing through his jeans, Elías’s gut twisted in a painful, stricken knot.

  “Jesus Christ,” he whispered in dismay. On screen, Lovato first clapped his hand against the outward swell of Pilar’s ass, then turned and followed at her beckon toward the bathroom.

  She was the bait. She must have seen Lovato’s bike outside on the w
ay to my condo and called her brother to tip him off. He planned the whole damn thing, got Pilar to come on to Lovato, get him into the bathroom. Valien and his crew, they were there somehow, waiting. It was all a trap.

  Although he had no explanation for how Valien or any other members of Los Guerreros might have slipped into the restroom unnoticed. There had been no sign of them entering the building on the tape. There were no windows in the restroom and the back door to the tavern had been dead-bolted shut from the inside.

  It doesn’t matter, Elías thought. They got in somehow. There’s no other possible explanation. No one Pilar’s size could have fought back against Lovato and won—much less have killed him.

  The idea that Pilar might have come on to Lovato made him feel sick, scraped raw and betrayed inside. Come on to him, hell, he thought. She’d practically given Lovato a hand job in the bar, for Christ’s sake, then lured him into the bathroom with promises of God only knew what, and all within an hour after leaving Elías’s bedside—after they had made love.

  His hand shot out and he slapped at the VCR, mashing the Stop button. Stumbling to his feet, his forked his hand through his hair and struggled to reclaim his breath. Cabrón, he thought, brows furrowed. Valien, that bastard—he used his own sister for bait. He probably thought she could use me as an alibi—good old pussy-whipped Elías, too busy thinking with his dick!

  Too busy thinking I was falling in love with her, he added, despondent. With a strangled, furious cry, he balled his hand into a fist and rammed it into the nearest wall, cracking the cheap wood paneling.

  “Not this time, Cadana,” he seethed as he stormed toward the office door, wishing like hell Valien was within arm’s reach so he could beat the ever-loving shit out of him. “Not ever again.”

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  The condo was dark and quiet, just as Elías had left it. He climbed out of the car, then bumped the door closed with his hip and took the steps up to his deck two at a stride. The sound of the encroaching surf was deafening, the wind whipping inland off the water ruthless and sharp. He ducked inside, sliding the heavy glass door shut behind him.